all photos: Chris Chen
As a rule I don’t go see oldies acts. Rock-and-roll comes from a young place, a teenage place, and I’d rather see a bunch of kids half my age fuck up a Stooges rip-off in a basement than watch my personal idol wrinkled into leather pants in the mid-distance on an arena stage. If a band is doing something exciting and new (say, any given Mission of Burma tour) it’s a whole different story, but why would you want to go to a show and watch the exhausted husks of a band, emptied of the vibrant bodies who used to dwell therein, creaking out a crisp, bloodless version of their younger selves’ anthems rather than go see some obscure band you haven’t heard yet who you’ll be killing yourself for missing out on in 20 years?
To conveniently answer my own question: you go because sometimes it’s a fuckload of fun. If the band is unique enough, wild enough, those old songs might still have some kick in them, like that bottle of champagne with the cork pushed halfway back in on the bottom shelf. A band like X is the perfect candidate for this revivification, since nobody can ever sound exactly like them. Their show at the 9:30 club last week may not have broken any new barriers, but they sure did have fun re-destroying the old ones.
Detroit Cobras opened up and played for an hour. They looked tired (maybe from spending nights trying to dodge my attempts to interview them all week?) but managed to stay awake by playing their most upbeat whip-cracking rockabilly tunes. The new bassist looks even more like a pinup girl than Rachel Nagy, which just can’t be a bad thing. Rachel’s voice sounded fantastic coming out of those big fat huge stadium speakers they got over there, so none of the radical fans boogying as hard as you can at 8:45 on a Wednesday had nothing to complain about, except maybe old Larry the DC Weirdo who goes to every show within 100 miles where chicks are playing punk rock. He probably could have used a more revealing outfit. On Rachel that is. The Cobras are great, as I’ve said before, one of the last bands that knows what R&B stands for. Thirty years from now I’ll probably still want to have sex with her voice, for starters, but I don’t know if the covers will have the same energy.
On the other hand no member of X has ever been mistaken for a sex symbol. Well maybe Billy Zoom was in the late 60s, but they’ve always seemed ancient to me, ever since I saw a bootleg tape of “Decline of Western Civ.” in 1994 and decided that Exene Cervenka looked like my buddy’s scary older sister who painted in menstrual fluid and carved her boyfriend’s band name in her calf. They’ve never fit anyone’s mold or tried to even give a shit about such things. So they came out looking like my parents, true, but right off the bat the sound was stellar. Hearing those crazy atonal harmonies live is as bone-chillingly awesome as you can imagine. And Billy’s guitar was still raw and dirty on every song, no pedal futzing or overblown effects necessary.
They played We’re Desperate and the crowd started to jiggle on their Tevas. The babysitter set came out en masse for this one, plenty of moms unveiling old tats and struggling to get the spike into that almost closed up nostril piercing. There were younger people too…I ran into Matt from the Whips leaning on the bar and grinning like he just popped a bagful of magic mushrooms. “I love this band!” He screamed at me. “Yeah me too, but these people are hilarious…I feel like if I started a circle pit I’d break someone’s hip!” He studied me over his sweat-rimmed glasses. “Who’s hip, yours?” He smirked. OK OK I’m no spring chicken myself. But I still deserve to be in front of these folks who just want to gawk.
I pushed my way up into Billy Zoom’s tractor beam range. Exene and John Doe are the stars, but Billy is the true onstage spectacle of the band, if you ask me. His stage presence is bewitching, hypnotic. He sways congenially with the music, smiling like a snake at specific members of the audience, making eye contact, tilting his head as if to say, “Yes? Like this? This is you, this song.” Try to concentrate on his fingers flying over the frets and the buzzy rockabilly runs that accompany that…if you get caught in his gaze you may never get away. I never realized how utter stillness and peace could seem so full of menace, but watching Billy crouch and point his guitar over the crowd like the staff of an evil wizard made me cross myself a few times just in case.
Oh yeah the song list.
The played Soul Kitchen, they played Johnny Hit and Run Pauline, they played very little off of Under The Big Black Sun and bunch of stuff from More Fun in the New World including We’re Having Much More Fun which I love. They opened the first encore with a Doe’s solo version of See How We Are which sounded better than the version off that record since he wasn’t deliberately fucking up the rhythm anymore. They played…let’s see…ah fuck it who cares what they played? After a while we all forgot what year it was and just bounced around and poured beer on our faces like wind-up monkeys gone broken from being keyed-up right. When Doe dedicated the title track off New World to the current idiots running for office nobody could remember who they were or who “What’s-his-name” was. “It was better before…”? Doubtful. This world was never new, not in 1980 or any other time.
That teenage place that rock and roll comes from is a black stone temple full of junked motorcycles and smashed jukeboxes, but the machines still work…if anything, they roar even louder now.
